Many industrial processing facilities are multi-staged. In such facilities, the processing stages are often spaced apart by hundreds of feet. While ethernet communication arrangements have been employed in the past, the acquisition of data from each stage has not, however, been synchronous with all other stages. In the past, the time correlation of data acquired at the various stages has necessarily been devised and developed at a later time, during the assessing of the data itself, if it is possible at all.
The prior art has not been capable of obtaining a continuous and synchronized recording of the operating parameters of the various stages in a distributed process. Indeed, there has been no capability of acquiring the data from the various stages on a time correlated basis. Any attempt to correlate data from one stage with the data taken from another stage at the same point in time has been fraught with complexity and technical difficulty in the best case, and impossible in the worst.
The prior art has taught the acquisition of data from various stages over the ethernet, with the data being transferred by means of standard category 5 connectors and conductors. Typically, such have comprised 4 sets of twisted-pair wire, but only 2 pairs have been used for data acquisition and control. In such systems, each processing stage has provided data separate and apart from the other stages.
There remains a need in the art for a synchronous data acquisition and transmission system in which the data is acquired from the various stages of an industrial process under the control of a common clock and synchronizing signal.